You Wanna Get High?

recent news has revealed how very weak we health professionals can be when it comes to money and drugs.

evidently if the king of pop asks you for a script for xanax you don't ask any pertinent questions like "hey, mike, you aren't already popping some 10-30 a night, are you?" and if he asks you to gank some propofol for him from the hospital, you happily comply. sad.

and if you yourself want some jollies and pills aren't enough for you, why not shoot up? a scrub tech in denver was recently discovered to be stealing syringes filled with fentanyl from the OR and injecting them in herself. so firstly, she was gaining access to something only anesthesia should be handling and was taking an extremely potent pain killer on a regular basis. and THEN she was refilling the syringes with saline and putting them back, so the patients, while paralyzed by other anesthesia drugs so they couldn't speak up, were getting no pain relief during surgery. and THEN, she knew all along that she had hepatitis C, but still gave back her dirty needle to be used on thousands of patients...and now 9 patients have been found to have hep C!! just atrocious.

when you sign on to practice health care you have all kinds of written and verbal ethics agreements and licensing boards you answer to, and always the threat of litigation. but that's not enough. deep down, you need to have some compassion for humans to get into it in the first place or you can be a major weapon. it's very scary. patients are so vulnerable to us, we cannot be this weak. we owe them more.

sigh.